Seeing partnership work in Arkansas, local leaders wonder whether Lawrence and Topeka should form new bonds

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Douglas County Commissioner Patrick Kelly, center, listens to a presentation from Fayetteville, Ark. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Steve Clark. The pair were at robotics lab in downtown Fayetteville that provides weeklong training courses to area residents there in how to program robotic devices.

FAYETTEVILLE, ARK. — Here in the Arkansas Ozarks, a billionaire is never very far away.

It is remarkable for one corner in an otherwise rural state to have not one, but rather a multitude of homegrown billionaires — courtesy of the Waltons of Walmart fame, the Hunts of J.B. Hunt Transport and the Tysons of their namesake poultry and protein empire.

But perhaps more remarkable is what the region doesn’t have — if you believe the local line: Envy and jealousy.

If a big, new electric vehicle manufacturer decides to locate its research and development facility in Bentonville, bringing 500 high-paying jobs to the city, leaders in Fayetteville, Rogers, Springdale or any of the other neighboring towns don’t lament and seethe about how their community lost out to a neighbor and a rival.

Instead, they celebrate.

“What is good for one is good for all,” said Arthur Hulbert, president and CEO of the Siloam Springs Chamber of Commerce.

That’s a motto here in the region, so much so that the names of the cities in this corner of Arkansas almost become secondary. Instead, people often say they live in Northwest Arkansas instead of a particular community.

“If you held a gun to their head and said ‘tell me where the city limits are,’ most residents couldn’t tell you,” Rogers, Ark. Mayor Greg Hines said of how one city flows right into the next in Northwest Arkansas. “And they don’t care. And if they don’t care, why should we?”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Multi-story, multi-use buildings have been built around the edge of the traditional town square in downtown Fayetteville, Ark..

Now, instead of Northwest Arkansas, imagine that same attitude between Lawrence and Topeka. Think of a day when it is unclear where Lawrence ends and Topeka begins. It is an idea that got some traction last week as about 130 community leaders from Lawrence and Topeka gathered in Northwest Arkansas as part of a trip organized by the Lawrence chamber of commerce and the Greater Topeka Partnership.

No one is predicting that a Lawrence/Topeka combination is going to happen tomorrow — and there are acknowledgements that it may never happen — but this trip to Northwest Arkansas has given the idea new momentum.

“There has been a mindset that we are very different from them,” Lawrence Mayor Courtney Shipley said of Topeka. “Until I saw these people in Northwest Arkansas work the way they are working, it simply did not occur to me that the lines don’t need to be as stark as we think they are.”

The idea of blurring the lines and lowering the competition between neighboring cities has a name. It is called regionalism, and it has been a topic on the mind of Matt Pivarnik, chief executive of the Greater Topeka Partnership and one of the organizers of the trip to Northwest Arkansas.

“Topeka needs a wildly successful Lawrence for Topeka to be successful, and Lawrence needs a wildly successful Topeka,” Pivarnik said.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

New, modern-style buildings have been allowed to develop next to older, historic buildings in downtown Fayetteville, Ark.

A new school color

That statement likely will create some questions in both communities. And, in fairness, there were questions by community leaders last week about whether this idea of regionalism works in other areas that don’t have a stable full of billionaires to fund any number of region-wide initiatives.

Indeed, if there were a drinking game last week that involved taking a shot every time it was acknowledged that a program was funded by a Walton, your gait would be as crooked as an old-time Ozark road.

In other words, is regionalism an idea by billionaires or a billion-dollar idea?

Northwest Arkansas leaders are convinced it is the latter, but that wasn’t always the case.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, it was all about school colors,” said Raymond Burns, president and CEO of the Rogers-Lowell Area Chamber of Commerce. “On Friday nights, we fought it out on the football field, and then on other days, we would fight it out again.

“Then, we realized the real school color is green — the color of money — if you start working together.”

There are plenty of signs that money is abundant in the region. Construction cranes can be seen in nearly every direction, and the oft-quoted statistic is that more than 30 people per day are moving to Northwest Arkansas.

That’s on top of a nearly 25% growth in population the metro area experienced from 2010 to 2020. The growth has brought tremendous change to the area, but several leaders said they’ve worked hard to build a community attitude that change is good.

“I couldn’t be prouder of how we have embraced the change,” said Doug Sprouse, mayor of Springdale, which has not only grown in population but has gone from being a community made up almost entirely of white residents to one where the nonwhite population is now near 40%. “You always are going to have people who say, I liked the good old days. Well, it is somebody’s good old days right now.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Glenn Whitman, director of the NWA Fab Lab in downtown Fayetteville, Ark. shows a visitor the lab’s CNC routing machine. The lab features five 3-D printers, laser cutters, embroidery machines, and a variety of woodworking machines for local entrepreneurs to use for a $30 per month fee.

Not all is perfect, though. Affordable housing is a problem, leaders here say. But some numbers suggest Lawrence — which has grown far slower — has struggled as much or more with affordable housing. Both the Lawrence and Northwest Arkansas metro areas have median household incomes of about $61,000, The median home value in Northwest Arkansas, though, was $186,500, according to the latest Census figures, while Lawrence’s median home value topped $212,000, according to the Census.

Northwest Arkansas leaders are confident that income numbers will grow too as the area transitions to a higher-tech economy. Canoo, an electric car manufacturer, has selected Bentonville for its headquarters and R&D operations, while leaders at the University of Arkansas are running a variety of programs funded with nearly $200 million of Walton grant money that is aimed at turning the region into a center for developing everything from drones to flying cars.

Already, unemployment in the region is less than 2%, which gives leaders a certain confidence when talking with people considering moving to the area.

“We tell people to go find a house and we’ll find you a job,” said Steve Clark, president and CEO of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce.

Leaders here also have another saying that oozes confidence and that they share with other communities that may want to replicate the region’s growth.

“We aren’t afraid to fail,” Burns said, “but we also aren’t afraid to succeed.”

The University of Arkansas has a major presence in downtown Fayetteville with the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.

Different flavors

Fear may not be the right word to describe the attitude some may have of a Lawrence/Topeka partnership.

But distaste might fit the bill.

Shipley, Lawrence’s mayor, said before this trip she had pushed back against the idea that Lawrence would need to partner with another community to achieve its desired prosperity.

“I’m just biased that Lawrence is the greatest place on earth,” she said. “I bristle if people suggest we can’t get people to come here or we can’t attract innovation.”

Leaders in Northwest Arkansas, though, said the idea of working together gives smaller communities a better chance of competing with a larger community to attract jobs or residents. One community can bring to the table an attribute that another community may be lacking. That approach also allows each community to keep its own unique feel. The idea isn’t for partner communities to be the same.

“I kind of see all of us as different flavors of ice cream in the same store,” Hulbert said of the various communities in the Northwest Arkansas region.

But to take the metaphor perhaps a step too far, not all flavors of ice cream go well together. Douglas County Commissioner Patrick Kelly said any talk of partnership also should consider potential drawbacks. If the rural area between Lawrence and Topeka is consumed by urban sprawl, for example, that’s an issue that could draw concern in Lawrence. Plus, Kelly said involving the communities of Baldwin City, Eudora and Lecompton in the idea of a regional partnership with Topeka also would be wise.

photo by: Courtesy: findingNWA.com

The Northwest Arkansas metro area stretches about 40 miles from Fayetteville in the south to Bella Vista near the Missouri border in the north.

That said, Kelly said the idea of a partnership is worth exploring. Lawrence City Commissioner Lisa Larsen agreed. She said partnering with Topeka — and potentially even Manhattan — to form a regional economy could provide the communities a leg up in attracting federal funding for a variety of projects.

Exactly what those projects might be isn’t clear now, but they have a way of emerging. It was just such a project that originally brought together the communities of Northwest Arkansas. Leaders felt the area needed a true regional airport, but they knew none of the cities had enough pull on its own to win the needed money for such a project. The billionaire families of the area, so the story goes, told the community leaders to lock themselves in a room and start working together to get an airport. The process worked, and the communities haven’t ever separated.

In the case of Lawrence and Topeka, community leaders probably won’t lock themselves in a room to try to win money for a new airport. But, Kelly said, perhaps they could rally around a simpler project, like building a new trail that connects Lawrence and Topeka. It could be a good test run for a partnership.

And it is one that probably doesn’t need a billionaire to complete. That’s good, because the common joke among Lawrence and Topeka leaders last week was that all their communities were missing were a few billionaires.

The Northwest Arkansas folks have heard those lines many times. They acknowledge that having the Walton, Hunt and Tyson families as backstops is a luxury many communities never get. But leaders here are convinced that communities don’t need the largesse of the billionaires to make this idea of a regional economy work.

“I think every region has its heroes, but at the end of the day it is a grassroots business effort that the chambers represent that will make this either fail or succeed,” Burns said. “I think it is an attitude and it has to grow at the grassroots level regardless of what the big guys say.”

But, if you still have billionaires on your mind, Burns suggested that there is something you can do about that too.

“Grow ’em,” he said

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Members of a 130-person delegation from Lawrence and Topeka walk down the Razorback Regional Greenway in Fayetteville, Ark. on April 29, 2022. The greenway is an approximately 40 mile, paved trail that connects the cities of Northwest Arkansas.

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